Stress and fear come from past experiences when we felt overwhelmed. Re-working these past experiences in therapy helps. Stress also come from our two faulty ways of thinking .

1. Expectations from ourselves, from others and from our lives that we hold very rigidly as a measure of success or happiness.
2. We perceive ourselves as doomed and helpless if what we expect did not happen. We are not ready to work with the reality that disappoints us. This is a way to frighten ourselves. It is better to hold our expectations not as ‘must and should happen’ but as ‘preferable’. We can also think and train ourselves in skills so that we would cope with the disappointing reality and find another way if those expectations were not met. We see that success and happiness can happen from many alternatives. Stress and fear thoughts get triggered for us from some happenings. If we know our triggers we can help ourselves feel relaxed and less sensitive to those. Learning relaxation strategies, neutralizing triggers, learning coping skills and holding lighter less rigid expectations helps.

No therapy is an alternative to any other therapy. All therapies co-exist and can have value and have different value for each person singly or in combination. Effective use of counselling therapies can sometimes avert the use of medication. Hypnotherapy can be a very useful and effective therapy.

Look at the answer to Question1 it will be applicable to you too. Any of the cognitive therapies, inter personal coping skill development therapies, hypnotherapy, regression therapy, EFT therapy and somatic therapy would help you that work with mind body energy healing tools.

Intuition can work when we keep ourselves free of clutter in our environment and in our mind. Improving the facuity of our 5 senses too helps. Meditation, breath consciousness, imagery work and dream awareness help raise our inner consciousness by being aware of how we experience at our inner sensory level and keep our aura in good health. Intuition works through the body, through our emotional processing and our fitness levels. Messages come to us in various forms – a spontaneous thought, a body sensation, co-incidences, dreams - keeping a log of these can help sort out those that are random and those that are intuitive messages.

You could fist notice in which areas your self esteem is low and in which areas you feel fine. Make a list of these. Also write down what situations bring down your self esteem – for example when someone ignores or criticizes or you see someone else succeeding. Then you can notice what your thinking is in such situations. Identify better coping thoughts for those situations and guide yourself with those. Sometimes these things bring us down as we are looking at ourselves from borrowed standards of others for success and lifestyle – comparison traps. They may not be our choice in the sense we would not be willing to make the lifestyle change or put in the effort that would be needed for that choice. Accepting your choices and the results that go with it are important ways to maintain self esteem. We need to separate our behaviour from our ‘person’ So instead of thinking “I am lazy” it is better to think “I have not done my work today’” Then follow this with thinking “How can I make up this day?” rather than judge “So now nothing will work for me.” Concentration goes when we feel low self esteem or are stressed. Sometimes one or two counselling sessions can sort this for you. Sometimes our low self esteem is stuck in a past experience or in our energy system.